Business process design is a highly collaborative task that requires different expert skills such as understanding the problem domain at hand, knowing modeling languages (e.g., Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN), UML sequence diagrams and event-driven process chains (EPC)), having an overview onto the underlying IT landscape, being familiar with the organization's strategic goals, knowing the process' surrounding conditions and constraints, etc. In essence, a number of people need to contribute their expertise to model or to re-engineer a business process. Those contributors may both (1) assume different functional roles within one organization (such as business analysts, domain experts, IT professionals, etc.) or (2) be representatives of different organizations within a full-blown network orchestration scenario where multiple business partners need to collaborate and the process stretches beyond organizational boundaries.
Information technology has been assisting the business process design collaboration. For example, web-based tools have been developed that allow multiple geographically dispersed people to jointly create and change a process model at the same time using desktop computers or laptops. Each contributor sees the other peoples' changes in near real-time, thus eliminating the need to work on separate copies of the model. The key advantage of this approach over working on different model copies is that each contributor immediately sees other people's changes while still being able to work independently without being blocked by someone else's changes. Apart from that, the tedious job of sorting out contradictions among contributions from different people and possibly having to fill gaps in a manual merging step is completely avoided. However, the existing IT tools do not provide the proper support for the initial phases of collaborative process design projects.
The process design initiatives are often kicked off by letting the involved people meet face to face and discuss over approaches, goals, and scope. This is often necessary as many people with different functional background need to collaborate. Usually, brainstorming sessions are conducted where participants write down their thoughts on paper notes that are stuck on a whiteboard. There, they may be clustered (e.g., by sticking them close to other notes expressing similar ideas), prioritized (e.g., by putting them on top of or above others), possibly withdrawn (e.g., removed from the whiteboard), commented (e.g., by writing on the whiteboard with a board marker), mutually associated (e.g., by drawing arrows between the notes), etc.
After some discussion, the team of experts will ultimately come to a conclusion that is documented on the white board. The paper notes themselves, their arrangement and the associated drawings usually make up a rough initial process model. In some cases, the team may have even sketched a proper process model using notations like BPMN. Although that model typically lacks details and needs to be refined and revised in later stages, it is still worth to be preserved in order to not lose any findings or decisions made during the meeting. Usually, someone from the team needs to take notes on a laptop computer or take a photo (like by using his or her mobile phone) of the white board itself. In the former case, that person will not only have a hard time typing down all the information that is written on the whiteboard but he or she will (deliberately or not) also filter out or condense the information from a personal perspective. In the latter case (where someone takes a photo of the paper-based notes stuck on a white board), that photo is almost useless when it comes to really start designing a process that needs to start over from scratch. This is because a photo merely captures “analogous” information where much of the meta data (like who has added which note) is lost. Further, text written on the paper notes or directly on the white board is merely captured on the photo and not readily available in digital form. Optical character recognition may be error-prone (due to the handwriting) and may not even be feasible at all.
People typically refrain from using existing web-based collaboration tools during initial process design meetings. This is not only because it feels un-natural to focus on interacting with a Web site displayed on a browser rather than talking to one another, but mainly due to small screen restrictions, the mobile devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), smartphones may only be able to show a small portion of the process model at a time. Although laptops provide certain mobility to members of a collaborative design team, the requirement of all attendees to carry around laptops or have access to large screen devices (e.g., desktop computers) for collaboration on a design is still too restrictive.
In today's world, ubiquitous mobile devices provide the most mobility. Accordingly, a need exists for a method and system for providing collaborative process modeling to mobile devices.